I'm a Fellow at the Adam Smith Institute in London, a writer here and there on this and that and strangely, one of the global experts on the metal scandium, one of the rare earths. An odd thing to be but someone does have to be such and in this flavour of our universe I am. I have written for The Times, Daily Telegraph, Express, Independent, City AM, Wall Street Journal, Philadelphia Inquirer and online for the ASI, IEA, Social Affairs Unit, Spectator, The Guardian, The Register and Techcentralstation. I've also ghosted pieces for several UK politicians in many of the UK papers, including the Daily Sport.

Google Play's Smaller But Growing Faster Than Apple's App Store

This is an interesting little peek into that great fight going on between the two ecosystems, Android and iOS. Apple‘s App Store has much larger sales than Google‘s Play but the latter is growing much faster than the former. So much so that it’s possible to see an overtaking in the near future:

In the inaugural study released by app analytics firm, App Annie , data shows that, worldwide, the Apple store is seeing revenues four times larger than the Google Play store, but isn’t growing at an impressive rate — in fact, the year-to-date growth actually is greater for the Google Play store at 311% compared to iOS at 12.9% in 2012.

And as the mathematicians among us will note you don’t need growth at 300% for all that long to close a fourfold gap. Indeed, if we straight line this then doesn’t the gap close in 18 months time or so?

If you look at the free downloads, there were more apps downloaded for Apple devices than Android, but not by much — in fact, downloads for Android apps grew 48% in the year-to-date, greater than iOS at 3.3% growth.

It should be said that Apple is disputing these figures but haven’t come back with more accurate ones as yet. There’s also some interesting geographical differences: Android seems to be more popular in Japan than it is in the US, at least by these figures.

However, there are some substantial provisos that need to go with these figures. They come not from the stores themselves but from a service provider to app makers. So only those who use their tools will be included in these numbers. Which is probably fair enough as a majority of the big selling apps do use them. But it will likely miss much of the long tail.

The other point to make is that of course Apple’s App Store is the only place you can get apps for Apple kit: assuming you don’t jailbreak it that is. But there are many more places to get Android apps than only Google’s Play.

So this certainly isn’t accurate information: it’s just a peek at the general state of play.

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